Every year around Christmas, I like to get out James Joyce's story The Dead, and re-read it. The tale is set on a snowy night in Ireland, and much of it takes place during a Christmas dinner/dance, which of course is why it feels so appropriate for this time of year, and for a holiday tradition. So it's just a custom of mine. One I especially relish. It's such a beautiful, powerful story. About married love. About first love. About what true love really is. Not, of course that the story has any final answers for us! Only that it explores the questions in a most beautiful and compelling way.
I hope that it's apparent in these posts on 9-volt nomad, that I'm a big fan of married love. I'm a fan of of love in general, and generally find there's not enough of it around, but I also think that married love needs more of a booster club these days than most people recognize. I know that may sound silly and bourgeois to some, and for some it may even seem distasteful. We're so much in the habit of wanting to believe that any lifestyle choice is equal to every other, that we're afraid to cheer for any given script. And especially any supposedly boring, traditional script.
I really do think that more people ought to get married than seem to want to get married these days. Partly because again, I think love in general ought to be more highly rated than it is, but also because I think that getting married is just a good way to get yourself to grow up and be adult; to learn that you're not the center of the universe, and that sacrifice is a part of life, and that it really is a meaningful act--to regularly put another human being's interests before your own. And to work out compromises. And to listen to advice. And to have someone who knows you deeply, always available for counsel. And to be able to serve your partner as counsel too.
Of course I'm not claiming that there aren't other ways of learning how to become an adult. But getting married and staying married is a time-tested and very effective path. Surely it's one of the most effective ways devised. Plus, at least if you're willing to work at it, being married is a good way to stay happy. You have company. You have a means of facing up to hardship. It's my conviction in fact that, as circumstances in general over the next couple of decades become more and more difficult (as they will), the economic and psychological advantages to marriage will become more and more obvious and compelling. It's paradoxical that so many these days say they want a career first, and then they'll think about love. But why not the other way around? Especially if two are usually more effective at providing economic security than one? And again, especially when the future looks more and more difficult?
Of course there are downsides to being married. One of the hardest parts has to be this: facing up to the certainty of death, and more specifically, facing up to the fact that--since the two of you are unlikely to die at the same time--one of you is going to have to do without the other for a time. Maybe for years and years. This is a really hard thing to think about. In fact it's so hard to think about that I find very little actually written about it. Very few poems or songs for instance that contemplate it directly, I mean ahead of the fact. Yes there are umpteen laments. But what about proleptic laments? Laments ahead of the fact?
All of which is to say, here's one such poem, on that theme, which I intend to use in my next play, and which I think is appropriate to this blog, because part of what 9-volt is about is the art of doing without, and the need to contemplate doing without, and finding that state of being in which transcendence is possible.
I'm sorry the music for the song is not available yet. The tune is set. It's simply not recorded. But when the soundtrack does become available (and it will be lovely I promise) I'll certainly let you all know. Then you'll be able to read the words married to their tune.
Here, Now
(A song from the play "Myles to Go")
I had a dream, what can it mean?
You were transformed into an angel:
Wings bright and strong, but somehow wrong;
They're far too heavy for your shoulders.
Glimpsed from below, a shooting star
Tumbles through the heavens.
Two feathers fall, and then that's all;
Waking up, I reach for you.
Some say that death, one final breath,
Could disestablish our communion.
It's just not true, a clearer view
Says grief's an art that takes its time.
Would Keats have dared to write an ode
Requiring such revision?
All we've arranged is sure to change,
Whether death takes me or you.
But who goes first, and who's immersed
In melancholy of division,
Oh let that be love's mystery
That's to be answered in its time!
No earnest heart would make its love
Contingent on the future;
Love gives its all, come flight or fall,
Hazarding the here and now.
HB
Until Tuesday the 31st!
When my son was still a toddler and my wife was still studying for her graduate degree, I quit my paying job and stationed myself at home: a stay-at-home parent and part-time writer. Time has since moved on. Sixteen years have passed. We've traded towns and my son is in college now. Still I stay home. Do I like it? Yes I do, and I anticipate that this liking will continue. The work suits me and answers a family need. Moreover it serves as grist for my writing and frees me to pursue my music when I can. I consider it a way of serving the world at large as well, because the practice of thrift and self-reliance at Sunnyside keeps our consumption down, and consumption (though our economists always want us to increase it) is something that without a doubt is destroying the world.
(Here at 9-Volt Nomad by the way economists get very little good press, for the simple reason that all along the spectrum--from Friedman to Krugman, from Hayek to Keynes--they all seem to believe the planet can be treated as infinite in scope and ever-ready for the pimping. Chop chop chop. Burn burn burn. Build build build. Take take take. They are like drummers who cannot alter the tempo or change from duple to triple time. They are geeky berserks, egging us on to a collateral-damage murder of the living world. To capture it all in one mild word, they are insane.)
But I was saying. I stay home in defiance of the economists; in defiance of the economists, I stay home. Circumstances of course may always change and require change from me, but my desire is to stay on at Sunnyside day by day and proceed in the acquisition of the arts of thrift and non-consumption. How long can this go on? Well as long as I live I suppose. Or the world lives. Maybe I'll die filling the birdbath, stirring the oatmeal, hoeing potatoes, or re-aiming the solar oven. But hey I'll not complain. After all, given a modicum of choice, why should a person live or die where he or she is unhappy? Why should ambition for money or professional respect, caught like a bad cold and generally from people with very little imagination, be allowed to muddle the mind and transplant us where we do not want to go or be?
Since the idea of a man doing the housework is still so mixed up in questions of feminism and the rigidity of gender roles, let me say from the beginning that I am far less interested in these questions than might be assumed, though I have on occasion found them painfully present in my life. Over the years I've taken guff and kidding on these matters from everyone from mattress salesmen to barkeeps and baristas. I've been called a kept man. I've been informed (out of the blue) of job listings, as if it were common knowledge that I needed help finding work. And while these incidents over the years have decreased in number, it may simply be that I do not notice them as much as I used to. Maybe too my having lived in one place for more than a decade now has accustomed the people around me to my manner of living. "Well he's never going to change." And they're right!
I consider myself a feminist in the sense that I believe that everyone, regardless of sex or gender, ought to be able to choose from among possible paths, the one that suits them best. This ought not to be controversial of course. The trouble with feminism though as I see it is that as a political, intellectual, and moral force it continues to insist on associating the domestic sphere with suppression and ennui, as if what happens at home can only be boring and demeaning, and as if life at the office can only be better. But home and the needs of the home need not enslave us. Not in my opinion anyhow. I myself stay at home not only because it seems to me to be the right thing to do--practically, economically, psychologically--for Sunnyside and the people who inhabit it, but also because (to say it again) I like it here. I find the work interesting, fulfilling, poetic, demanding. Boring sometimes yes, but what work isn't sometimes boring? Now, I am no dunce. I am a learned, sociable person who loves conversation and ideas. Surely if I can enjoy the work of keeping a home, then many others could too, who currently might think otherwise; I am not some rare flower.
One major advantage of the Sunnyside arrangement is that it helps my wife--your more classic busy professional--stay sane and grounded. Emergencies of any sort need not throw her completely off. If she forgets her lunch, it can be hand-delivered free of charge. If she has a meeting that goes till 5:30, well someone can see to it that some soup is bubbling when she does make it home. Repairs to the home or to the car need not impinge upon her schedule. Moreover the arrangement has been good for our marriage and for keeping us connected as a couple. Life is good for us, in part because we are lucky people, living in a time and a country still deeply blessed with at least the sunset of prosperity; in part too though, because the two of us have consciously constructed our existence to exclude ambitions that require high income and instead emphasize time together. Time to talk. Time to enchant one another. Time to re-connect. Time simply to be one another's comfort, inspiration, and stay. If for instance, she's making the evening meal, as she enjoys doing, I will sit down in the kitchen as she works and talk or read to her. (We just finished a fine book by Hugh Walpole, full of suspense and psychological interest, called Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill. And we're moving on now to the Brothers K. by Dostoyevsky). Or if I am struggling with a refractory story-plot, I have a literature expert right beside me to talk it over on a walk.
Of course the arrangement does have its downsides too. For me, it has always involved a certain amount of loneliness. There are not a whole lot of colleagues in the 9-volt Nomad world, at least not yet! As for my wife, well she has often wished she could participate more deeply in the life of the home: gardening, sewing, cooking, preserving food, but that is difficult. She enjoys her professional work, but it requires a great deal of energy, and there is not always much left over at the end of the day to do a great deal else. We make it a point to work together on the weekends on domestic tasks; a couple of weekends ago for instance we drove out and picked free apples at the home of a friend (of a friend): apples which otherwise would have gone to waste. Then the following weekend we milled about a third of the stash into sauce and canned it. But after all, weekends are not everything.
I myself look forward to a day when the question "what do you do for living?" with all its baggage of and "how much money do you make?" and "are you interesting and worth talking to?" morphs into something more like: "how do you make ends meet?" Admittedly this is a question more specific to the topic of economic means, but at least it carries with it the possibility that getting along in a practical way doesn't have to be a matter of being employed for salary or wages, but might easily include expertise in maintenance and thrift, gardening and hand-work, as well as reliance on community and family: skills in other words that we contain within ourselves without reference to money; social resources that we cultivate by means of kindness and generosity.
How do you make ends meet?
The possibilities, when the question is asked that way, seem so much more ingeniously varied than anything that the burn, burn, burn folks could ever come up with, don't you think?
HB
Until Saturday the 19th!
